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Nope, just need two boxes with standard licenses so you can support storage vMotion and FT. High availability (FT) means two copies of data. vMotion can be done between storage devices with storage vmotion licensed.

Nope, just need two boxes with standard licenses so you can support storage vMotion and FT. High availability (FT) means two copies of data. vMotion can be done between storage devices with storage vmotion licensed.

Standard comes with these if I recall correctly, essentials does not.

When did vSphere Standard licensing include a VSA? There was an essentials Plus bundle for this.

FT within a VMware context just means lockstep of CPU and Memory. It can be done with one copy of the data on shared storage (actually is normal, although Flash VSA's are catching on for this).

Or can you do those two things with just two vm boxes with their own internal storage?

The answer to that is no for HA/vMotion if your trying to be safe and not risk split braining your data. (you need 3 boxes to run locally shared storage VSA/vSAN and have a proper witness/heartbeat node).

No assuming you have another system that can handle this functionality then you can do it, but remember it requires internal RAID, and THEN mirroring on top of it, so be sure to size appropriately (less than 25% of RAW disk will be usable).

Or can you do those two things with just two vm boxes with their own internal storage?

The answer to that is no for HA/vMotion if your trying to be safe and not risk split braining your data. (you need 3 boxes to run locally shared storage VSA/vSAN and have a proper witness/heartbeat node).

No assuming you have another system that can handle this functionality then you can do it, but remember it requires internal RAID, and THEN mirroring on top of it, so be sure to size appropriately (less than 25% of RAW disk will be usable).

But keep in mind that ANY solution with the term "HA" involved has to do the same things somewhere. Whether internal or external, still needs the clustering.

Basically all in the title. Do you have to have a SAN in order to take advantage of VM High Availability, or VMotion?

Or can you do those two things with just two vm boxes with their own internal storage?

VM HA is a half-assed solution: you do reboot VM on another node so downtime is present. For a guest VM cluster you do need some sort of a shared storage usually (unless app does it on it's own say database mirroring with SQL Server) but it can be VM-specific. And yes you can build such a thing on top of a pair of a free ESXi boxes. And you don't need shared storage for "shared nothing live migration".

All you need is shared storage. This can be done easily with a SAN but it can also be done with the new free tools with even the small business versions of vCenter which uses local storage on several host to create a shared environment. My first shared storage was an awesome Dell MD3200 direct SAS 6GB shared storage device which 4 hosts can connect to redundantly. Its pretty cheap for the small market and punch's out some serious IO (Veeam backups run at 600 m/b sec and can snap my 500 gig exchange server in the middle of the day in <30 min on an initial).

Can't you just setup 2 big VMWare hosts with lots of local disk space, processing power and RAM (to be able to run all VMs by themselves) and replicate them to eachother in real time via Veeam? If one goes down, the other picks up? Or even split VM load between the two but still somehow replicate.

Can't you just setup 2 big VMWare hosts with lots of local disk space, processing power and RAM (to be able to run all VMs by themselves) and replicate them to eachother in real time via Veeam? If one goes down, the other picks up? Or even split VM load between the two but still somehow replicate.

Almost, but that is async replication, not full replication. This is by far the more recommended way for SMBs as full sync is ridiculously expensive and almost never justified. Async does not "failover" automatically so it requires manual intervention.

Full sync with HA requires VSA and VMware's HA component. That costs a lot more and only buys you a few minutes. That's why we say that HA is only to protect against a few minutes of downtime and nothing more and why you have to justify $10K of licensing in ten minutes of downtime.

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